


Descendant

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, adventures on undiscovered worlds in pursuit of unknown goals, ancients are pains in the butt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-15
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-03 16:30:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/383541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone, however well-intentioned, kidnapped him, judged him like a god, <em>fucked with his mind</em> in lasting and non-trivial ways, and returned him without explanation... all for what?</p>
<p>Evan Lorne has been part of the Stargate Program long enough to be able to roll with these sorts of things... if he could remember anything about his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Descendant

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Disappearing Act](https://archiveofourown.org/works/383522) by [Domenika Marzione (domarzione)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione). 



> [Cast of Characters/the Big List of OCs (because there are more than seven people in Atlantis and they all have names)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/372765)

In a detached sort of way -- which is all he has available right now -- it's interesting to see your life from the outside. He's a stranger to himself, never having met Evan Lorne and not sure who that fellow is or what he's supposed to think of him.  
  
He is an empty vessel (not completely empty, just apparently empty of everything useful) and he can only be filled by what others pour into him. He picks out pieces of his life by what is reflected back at him in the parade of faces who appear in his doorway, hoping to find something familiar, or at least a piece big enough to cling to until whatever this is ends.

If it ends.

He feels like he's renting this body, like he'd rent a car; it's unfamiliar and he's not quite sure of its quirks or what's in the glove compartment, but he has to take care of it or lose his deposit. When he says as much to one of the doctors, he gets a bitter laugh, like he's made a better joke than he understands.

* * *

Lorne is a good guy, it seems, and valued for more reasons than the fact that everyone seems to be not entirely kidding when they say that everything will grind to a halt if he's out of commission for too long. Evan is heartened by this -- nobody wants to find out that they're really an asshole -- but it's not actually a relief. Instead, it's just another pressure on him, another reason to get this all unscrewed as quickly as possible because he doesn't want to make things more difficult for _Lorne_ once he's back in control.

He tries to keep the fact that he's distinguishing between himself and the person he's supposed to be quiet, but saying "I" when it feels like "him" for all practical purposes is awkward and he sometimes doesn't bother. Safir tells him not to do that because they've got enough crazy people around here and don't need to add someone with multiple personalities to complete the collection.

"Maybe I am crazy," he tells Safir. "Maybe I've always been."

Safir's supposed to know him well, better than almost everyone. More than one person has told him so, especially Colonel Sheppard, who actually does seem to know him extremely well. But Safir is a bit of a cypher and all Evan can read off of him is an intense loyalty and the impression that that loyalty has been earned. There's nothing in Safir's demeanor that invites asking how.

"You're not crazy," Safir replies evenly. "You're currently damaged, but not in that way."

Bizarrely, those not-very-comforting words spoken in a completely matter-of-fact way are, in fact, a relief. Evan wonders if whatever Lorne did to inspire Safir's loyalty is really a two-way street, if Lorne trusts this irascible man as completely as Evan wants to and that's why he takes heart in being told to stop imagining the worst.

Or maybe he's just projecting.

* * *

Evan's not sure if he's getting better or simply getting better at faking it. He's pulling together fragments of Lorne's life, but like it's a vase that's been broken and not like they are parts of his own life. He still doesn't feel any kind of ownership of the details he's gleaned, but he collects them nonetheless and keeps them meticulously organized in his otherwise empty head.

Which does not keep him from getting frustrated. Unable to manage anything approaching guile in this ill-fitting form, he knows everyone else is watching him carefully, reading minutely into every gesture and utterance. They want to find the familiar, too.

Sick of being observed, sick of his life being reduced to waiting for the real Lorne to show up, Evan closes his eyes and hopes for sleep. He hasn't dreamt since he's been like this, at least not dreams he can remember, but the emptiness of sleep is much less discomfiting than the emptiness he feels while awake.

Except this time, he does dream.

In his dreams, he is back in time, back before Evan and Lorne were separate individuals with shared features and acquaintances. He doesn't feel like a stranger, though. He feels like he's where he's supposed to be -- in a cockpit of a Stratotanker, being dragged around Haight-Ashbury by his sister looking for a Mother's Day present, slouching at a conference table during an endless group meeting trying not to notice Colonel O'Neill asleep across from him, in the back seat of his green Datsun on the receiving end of Alison Feeny's first blow job, sneaking back onto base at Osan with the gang after six beers too many, watching Ortilla break off bits of a Nestle Crunch for a little indig girl on some planet, accepting condolences at his father's funeral. After so much emptiness, it's almost too much, but he's happy to drown in the sense of _belonging_ somewhere.

He wakes with a start and the almost tangible sensation of everything slipping away. But it doesn't, not all of it, and what is left is something that wasn't there before.

* * *

He's aware that Safir -- _Yoni_ \-- is poised to react should he move suddenly, to meet violence of action with violence of action. He's aware that Yoni believes he is protecting Evan from himself as much as Carson from Evan. He's also aware that that won't make it hurt any less if Yoni does strike.

"I'm not going to do anything," he sighs again. "Just go get Colonel Sheppard and Doctor Weir."

He woke up almost dizzy with knowledge. Knowledge of who he is, what happened to him, and, most importantly, _why_. He'd laugh about it, wants to laugh about it, but despite Yoni's earlier assurances that he isn't crazy, he isn't sure Beckett shares the diagnosis and it's of the utmost importance that he be believed.

Objectively, he can understand why Carson and Yoni are skeptical, why they are hesitant to accept his sudden surety. But mostly he's frustrated because this is the fucking Stargate Program and weirder stuff has happened. Recently. And, for once, this isn't about someone trying to kill them and they really need to take advantage of that. Quickly, because whatever this is isn't firm in his mind like his returning memories are becoming; it's vague and ephemeral and every time he tries to reach out to grab it, it melts from his fingers like sand.

To his surprise, Weir is willing to grant him enough rope to either chase down his memory ghosts -- or hang himself. To his profound relief, Sheppard trusts him enough to bet on the former.

Which is why Evan feels a little cruddy lying to him.

He's not lying about the big things -- he really does know why whatever happened to him (and while he's willing to accept Ascension, he's also willing to accept that it was something else) and he really does have most of his memories back. But not all of them and not all of those gaps are minor or irrelevant.

He knows Mrs. Cranshawe was his third grade teacher, but he also knows he'd probably do poorly on a quiz about key events of his life if it required any detail. His memories are jumbled, like they were tossed into a suitcase with too little time to take care in the packing, but he's pretty sure everything's in there just the same. He hopes, at least. He doesn't feel as desperately isolated and lost as he had before -- earlier today, even -- but he's still looking at the world with new eyes. His life -- the conflation of Evan and Lorne -- is within reach. 'Lorne' feels less like another person and more like a new suit that's been tailored to fit perfectly but still hasn't been worn enough to get the stiffness out of it. Evan believes -- has to believe -- that everything will be sorted out with time. That lying to Sheppard -- and Yoni and, to a lesser extent, Carson and Weir -- will be justified. That he will never have to tell them that he was lying in the first place.

Before, he saw their trust in Lorne as a precious gift he was carrying for someone else; now he feels it on his own shoulders. It is all the more precious and precarious for that.

He spends his time between his liberation from the infirmary and the mission launch trying to organize his memories and his life. He reads mission reports and old emails, seeing what comes up as memory and what he simply has to memorize in case he's questioned. Under the pretext of boredom-inspired housecleaning, he examines every artifact in his quarters for keys to his past. His social interactions are careful anyway, nobody wanting to press too hard in case they break the thin glass that is the veneer of Major Lorne Is Fine. All of Little Tripoli keeps a watchful eye on him that would be maddening if the undercurrent of genuine concern wasn't visible, too; his friends make stupid jokes about make-believe debts he does not owe and movies he should watch again because he didn't remember hating them the first time. He does his best to keep up his side of the masquerade.

Major Lorne is not quite Fine -- better than before, not great yet. But he fakes it well.

* * *

Everyone's watching him like a hawk as he gets ready for the mission; he asks Sheppard if he should go unarmed, just in case. Sheppard looks at him as if he asked if he should go up to the gate room and sing show tunes; Sheppard's easy trust makes everyone else relax a bit.

His marines don't quite hover, but they maybe drift a little less toward Kagan's platoon than they otherwise would have -- hanging out with the 'normal' marines is their preferred MO on off-world missions. Yoni isn't quite on his best behavior, either, but he's acting like he knows that everyone's got enough to do without worrying about him, too.

Evan, meanwhile, feels like a cross between a carnival psychic and a broken GPS; he's sort of sure of where they're supposed to be going, but his directions are a little wonky ("turn right on to unknown road" really means "take this exit off the highway") and he's not really inspiring confidence in his ability to get them to a destination they're not sure exists. But he's never blatantly wrong -- he's not directing anyone into crevasses or off mountainsides and the one time he says to walk into a wall, they actually do have to walk into the wall.

By the time they get to the meadow, he can feel everyone's confidence returning, can see everyone relax and start giving each other knowing looks of "see, I knew he was right all along." Which is why it's either appropriate or ironic that this is where he ends up confessing to Sheppard that he's not quite as right in the head as everyone thinks he is.

Sheppard doesn't look betrayed for more than half a second (but it's a half a second Evan would like to never see again), then adjusts. And then McKay starts on about Ancient shields and time dilation fields and Evan nearly pukes at the thought of having doomed so many for his singlemindedness... until it turns out that he hasn't. In which case he merely goes back to being acutely aware of the danger he's put everyone else in in a way that he'd been better able to stifle when they'd left Atlantis.

Oddly -- or maybe not, considering -- this puts him in better standing with Sheppard, who is intimately familiar with this particular sort of horror.

When they meet Marick, 'Evan' and 'Lorne' merge with a force Lorne is surprised the others can't hear or see. Waves of memories comes back, sliding into place like a television that'd gone blank for a second and then there was a clear picture again. He's himself again, but not everything that he feels is his life settling on his bones once more. He can feel the absences, the _holes_ , like they are carved out of his skin. There are discrete gaps in his memories, none so large as the one that excised his time with Arvas. Who might be an Ancient or might be just another advanced species who can fuck with the heads of the poor homo sapiens -- or both, since the Ancients are not guaranteed to be acting in anyone's best interest but their own.

He's more freaked out by what he might've done to imperil Atlantis -- or, god forbid, Earth -- than that he doesn't remember getting abducted and interrogated in the first place. He's been abducted and interrogated before, a few times; he doesn't actually mind not remembering that. But he wants to know what he told whoever was asking the questions.

Sheppard gives his shoulder a quick pat and squeeze as he moves past him to follow Marick back to the Noeem's village. It's a tiny gesture he doesn't think anyone else saw, but it lets him breathe a little easier. 'Don't worry,' it said. 'I trust you still.'

There's a lunch and the usual sort of meeting-the-locals banter before they get down to the actual business that brought them here and Lorne's usually good at this -- he's _great_ at this -- but he can't quite muster up the energy and enthusiasm today. And so instead of Sheppard letting him do most of the talking, Sheppard takes the lead himself, letting Teyla help guide the conversation.

And then they get to the answers -- some of them, not all of them satisfactory. But one of them is the reason they're out here in the first place and as they pack up the crate of crystals for transport back to Atlantis, Lorne can't help but feel bitter and used because this has been an awful lot of stress and drama for what is essentially a treasure map.

He's been with the Stargate Program for years now; he knows the career path of an SG-team officer is essentially a never-ending sequence of pratfalls. He's gotten drunk, drugged, and stoned out of his fucking mind all in the line of duty. He's carried back members of other teams in similarly impaired states. He's got half of the [altered-state codes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/383455) memorized, along with the SGC's SOP for quarantine both before and after the fact. That doesn't make this easier to just sit back and _take_ it.

Someone, however well-intentioned, kidnapped him, judged him like a god, _fucked with his mind_ in lasting and non-trivial ways, and returned him without explanation... all for what?

He doesn't let himself feel too much self-pity; all he has to do is look around to be reminded that everyone else has gotten jerked around, too.

On the walk home, his marines get into a discussion about which Muppet they should be, since they are all obviously puppets. Ortilla is trying to cast them as members of Dr. Teeth's band, partially because he feels that the command element should be cast as the lead characters and mostly because he seems to think that the band are the coolest muppets. Reletti takes issue with being assigned Janice, but can't seem to mount a convincing rebuttal. Kagan, passing them by as he returns to his own marines from a quick confab with Sheppard, volunteers to be Beeker.

"It's over," Sheppard says to him as they wait for everyone to pass through the second transporter, the one that takes them from the icy mountains to the plains near the gate. It is both a statement and a question.

"I hope so," Lorne replies, looking up to meet his gaze because Sheppard can reinforce his trust in his XO all he wants, but Lorne knows he's got to prove himself worthy of that faith and that forgiveness and that starts with being completely honest. "This was an expensive adventure. I hope it was worth it."

There's no guarantee. The Ancients, almost more than anyone, are big fans of going the extra mile to gain the extra inch.

They return to Atlantis and a cautiously anxious Doctor Weir; she and Sheppard exchange some kind of look that has her nodding and relaxing and giving directions as to what to do with the crate of crystals. It's almost normal, except that nobody is joking about how a joint mission with both senior teams didn't go pear-shaped.

* * *

Lorne is fully reinstated in his duties the following day, something he fights for even though he can still feel the holes in his life where some of his memories should be. Yoni signs off on it even though he knows that Lorne's lying about how much is still gone. Sheppard agrees even though he knows the same. The trust they are both showing him is humbling, reminders of why, despite the mindfucks and indignities and scars of every variety that they collect like box tops, this isn't the worst place in either galaxy to be.


End file.
